Dipartimento di filologia classica "Augusto Rostagni"

This essay is a comparative reflection on two models of representation of female characters, i.e. between the puella in Roman elegiac poetry and the heroines of the Victorian plot, in order to emphasise structural similarities in the treatments of the heroines in these two different worlds. Three films, a novel and an ancient counterpart in the Roman elegy are taken into account: different plots that not only are distant in time, but also belong to different aesthetic disciplines. None the less the physical setting of the stories proves to be a way of using landscape as a mean to ground a very peculiar notion of space, i.e. the landscape as evidence of gender: a gendered space, built up in a kind of anti-pastoral, anti-elegiac way, in order to reflect the interiority of a few, brave women who surmount the boundaries of the oikos/Victorian house and find themselves in the wilderness.

The Latin noun ceparius, recurring only in Lucilius’ fragment 195 M. (lippus edenda acri assiduo ceparius cepa), has been considered by critics as derived from cepa (‘onion’) and has been generally interpreted as meaning ‘onion-eater’ or, less frequently, ‘onion-seller’ or ‘onion-grower’. Taking full advantage of the witness offered by a Xth century glossa (Gloss. 5.565.5: ceparius ortulanus), the author of this essay suggests that ceparius
is a perfect synonym for holitor and κηπουρός, and that it is etymologically connected not with the Latin word cepa, but with the Greek κῆπος (‘hortus’).